This article is the eighteenth installment in our series "Christian, What Do You Believe: The Belgic Confession of Faith." Find the whole series here.
One of the worst of all feelings is hopelessness. If you’ve ever gotten terribly lost, or couldn’t find a little child, or been diagnosed with a deadly disease, you know the feeling. Sometimes, our own bad decisions leave us thinking we will never find our way. Sins against us make us feel unwanted. We try to make things work, but nothing we do fixes the problem. What we need most in hard times is hope: well-grounded reasons to believe that everything will be okay.
The greatest message of hope is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus offers his life for ours, his righteousness for our sin. That is good news. But only people who have come to the end of their own resources will receive it gladly.
The Belgic Confession introduces the gospel the way Scripture does, injecting it at the darkest part of the story. God has made, and is keeping, a promise to bring happiness out of hopelessness.
Why Do I Need Hope?
Scripture ties our hopelessness to the misery of our first parents.
Adam ignored God’s warning (Gen. 2:17) and recklessly “plunged himself … into both physical and spiritual death” (art. 17). Because of his sin, his body would return to the ground from which it came; even as he lived, he began to groan with death pangs (Gen. 3:19; Rom. 8:22). Adam also lost his spiritual vitality. He rejected God’s gift of true knowledge, righteousness, and holiness. He became spiritually dead and transmitted his corruption to his posterity (Eph. 2:5). If we are not healed of our depravity we will suffer eternal condemnation. Living in a “body of death” (cf. Rom. 7:24) is a heavy weight to bear. You’ve made huge mistakes that made you want to turn back time and do better. But you can’t. You regret your past actions. You live with present pain. You dread future consequences. You understand why Adam became “completely miserable.”
In his misery, Adam made another bad decision; “trembling all over, [he] was fleeing” from God. Adam and Eve “heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden” (Gen. 3:8). We were made to enjoy the Lord. Prior to their sin, Adam and Eve fellowshipped with God. They welcomed his presence and loved his voice. After the fall they hid themselves behind the flimsy protection of fig leaves. When we sin against God, we should humble ourselves in his sight (James 4:9–10). But we are tempted to hide. James invites double-minded sinners with bloodstained hands and filthy hearts to “Draw near to God” (James 4:8).
But to approach a holy God, we must be assured that he will actually receive us in peace.
What Is God’s Promise of Hope?
God, the good shepherd, “set out to find” Adam. “He comforted him” by promising that Eve’s offspring would bruise Satan’s head (Gen. 3:15). Eve’s “offspring” refers, in part, to the covenant people who would come from her. There have always been two families. Some people cling to God’s promise of restoration. Others side with the devil in his work of further corruption (John 8:44). You will find your identity either in Christ or in the principles that oppose him.
More specifically, the offspring is Jesus. God’s promise of offspring is not in the plural, “referring to many, but referring to one … who is Christ” (Gal. 3:16; cf. Gen. 3:15). God promised to “give [Adam] his Son… to crush the head of the serpent, and to make him blessed.” Since the fall of Adam, Christ has been thwarting the devil’s plans for evil domination. Jesus’ physical entrance into the world intensified this spiritual battle (Rev. 12:3, 4). As the second and greater Adam (Matt. 4:1; 1 Cor. 15:45), Jesus’ first ministry act was to resist Satan’s temptations. He consistently exercised power over the devil and his demons (Matt. 4:1–11; Luke 8:31; Acts 10:38). He decisively defeated Satan at the cross. As Jesus died, it seemed like the devil had won (Luke 22:53). In reality, by his death, Christ had conquered that great enemy death which entered the world through the devil’s work. Jesus ensured a death sentence for the serpent and “The God of peace will soon crush Satan” (Rom. 16:20). That dragon will be cast into the lake of fire and sulfur to be tormented day and night forever and ever (Rev. 20:10).
No message could have meant more to trembling Adam and Eve. The gospel is good news!
How Should I Respond to God’s Promise of Hope?
Witness in the gospel message God’s “marvelous wisdom and goodness.” His wisdom is unsearchable. We can’t understand why God didn’t immediately carry out his threat of death upon the first sinners, why he delayed so long to judge the serpent, or why he waits to rescue us from our misery. But we can trust his patient wisdom. “When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Gal. 4:4–5). God always knows best; he always does best. The whole Bible “describes the great God who is searching for and seeking to save that which is lost. God is pursuing us, while we are the fugitives fleeing from him.” God the Father seeks worshippers (John 4:23) who know their misery but who have come to Christ for refuge.
Knowing God to be wise and good, you should seek his grace. Like Adam and Eve, all of us are utterly unworthy of God’s kindness. Our only hope is to find grace in God. And he encourages us in this hope. “Grace is God in the act of giving himself to men, acting upon and within them to restore them to fellowship with himself.”
Don’t lose hope. The devil seems strong, but in a short while he will be nothing. God’s Son will “destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8; cf. Heb. 2:14). “We who are beaten and bruised by that ancient serpent have found our victory in the one who was bruised in order to crush the serpent’s head.”
Footnotes
R.C. Sproul, The Gospel of God (Ross-shire, Great Britain: Christian Focus Publications, 2005), 65.
Peter Y. De Jong, The Church’s Witness to the World, 2:39.
Daniel R. Hyde, With Heart and Mouth: An Exposition of the Belgic Confession (Grandville, MI: Reformed Fellowship, Inc., 2008), 229.
